Top Gun 2

steingar said:
That, and a guy who can afford to care and feed a P51 riding a Kawasaki from the 80s. The H2 he rode later on was a little more up to speed.
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That wasn’t a stretch for me at all. I could get a new bike tomorrow but the only one I want to ride is the one I’ve had since high school.
 
steingar said:
That, and a guy who can afford to care and feed a P51 riding a Kawasaki from the 80s. The H2 he rode later on was a little more up to speed.
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A lot of people gripe about the P51, but I don't have a problem with it. I have several friends who retired as single O-6's with no kids. All that deployment money and pilot retention bonus money went into the stock market and compounded over 30+ years, and they are very well off now. Others bought a house everywhere they were stationed and kept them all. A $2M airplane sounds impossibly expensive until you consider that the average home price in San Diego is over $1M. Plus he apparently lives in his hangar.

It is Tom's plane and Tom's movie. If he wants to combine them, who is going to say No?
 
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Ed Haywood said:
A lot of people gripe about the P51, but I don't have a problem with it. I have several friends who retired as single O-6's with no kids. All that deployment money and pilot retention bonus money went into the stock market and grew over 30+ years, and they are very well off now. Others bought a house everywhere they were stationed and kept them all. A $2M airplane sounds impossibly expensive until you consider that the average home price in San Diego is over $1M. Plus he apparently lives in his hangar.
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And who knows if he has partners in the plane? Yea, its fantasy so of course not but lots of ways to swing it. I had an 0-6 CO who had been single his whole life until his last tour in the Pentagon and married an Army 0-6 in the same boat. I suspect north of 10K a month just in retired pay.
 
Pugs said:
I suspect north of 10K a month just in retired pay.
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Probably $18K a month for the two of them combined. Plus more-or-less free health care. And all the $$ they socked away on deployments.
 
steingar said:
That, and a guy who can afford to care and feed a P51 riding a Kawasaki from the 80s. The H2 he rode later on was a little more up to speed.
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Did you miss his collection in that dream mancave hangar? A whole bunch of cycles, some really cool ones...and an old jeep... bunch of other stuff that I didn't catch
 
Needs to have a name on that P-51. Like “Kiss Me Penny” or something like that. Bad luck to have a P-51 with no name.
 
I saw an interview on the history channel of a couple of WW2 P-51 pilots. The interviewer asked him if he named the plane. He said, more or less, "Of course, I named it after the girl I was dating. She asked what the name of the plane was, and I said 'Baby Mine, I named it after you baby!'"

Way smarter guy than me.
 

Pretty funny IMO. Never really realized how serious of pilot Tom cruise was.
 
RyanShort1 said:
Pretty sure he used to have one on there... and it timed out. Kate maybe?
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Yep, said “Kiss Me Kate.” Hopefully it was in vinyl letters and easily removed. :D
 
Saw it last night.

From the getgo, the premise that a service member can ride a motorcycle through an installation gate with no helmet or reflective jacket is in itself preposterous.

And I'm no expert by any means, but... what would actually happen to someone if they punched out at Mach 10? I can't imagine that would be a good thing.

And Tom Cruise, a washed out Top Gun ace and general F-up has remained a lowly captain? Few military officers make flag rank by retirement!

Nice flight scenes. The real ones, not the CGI stuff.

Seeing it at a theater that offers full bar service is a plus.
 
I saw it last night. It would have been more enjoyable if it wasn't for the older lady who sat right beside me when the whole row was empty and had to laugh at everything. I also noticed the gate entry thing as well. They tried really hard to make similarities to the original which I thought was pretty cute. Overall, I liked it. Favorite part, his first flight as the bad guy with the new class.
 
Sac Arrow said:
Saw it last night.

From the getgo, the premise that a service member can ride a motorcycle through an installation gate with no helmet or reflective jacket is in itself preposterous.

And I'm no expert by any means, but... what would actually happen to someone if they punched out at Mach 10? I can't imagine that would be a good thing.

And Tom Cruise, a washed out Top Gun ace and general F-up has remained a lowly captain? Few military officers make flag rank by retirement!

Nice flight scenes. The real ones, not the CGI stuff.

Seeing it at a theater that offers full bar service is a plus.
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Liquified pilot, lol. In all seriousness, I could imagine that such an aircraft would have an eject "pod" kind of like the F-111. The XB-70 Valkyrie also had ejection pods, which may be what this "experimental Mach 10 aircraft" was supposed to be or modeled after.
 
SoonerAviator said:
Liquified pilot, lol. In all seriousness, I could imagine that such an aircraft would have an eject "pod" kind of like the F-111. The XB-70 Valkyrie also had ejection pods, which may be what this "experimental Mach 10 aircraft" was supposed to be or modeled after.
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More Iike the B-58 Hustler ejection capsules. Friend of mine was involved in the test program that used Gorillas as test subjects. He said it was difficult to have the gorillas “agree” to a second ride.

Cheers
 
X-15 and SR-71 didn’t use pods because of weight. Larger aircraft like the B-58 and XB-70 could get away with pods. No telling if even a pod could survive Mach 10.
 
Velocity173 said:
X-15 and SR-71 didn’t use pods because of weight. Larger aircraft like the B-58 and XB-70 could get away with pods. No telling if even a pod could survive Mach 10.
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Growing up where I did and having family connections I had the privilege of talking to several of the test pilots from that era growing up. "Men of Steel" would be accurate.
 
OneCharlieTango said:
Actually, none of it was CGI. All of the flying was real, according to Kevin LaRosa, the Aerial Coordinator. For the airplanes that don't exist, they flew F-18's (IIRC) and skinned them in post.

The things you learn at Oshkosh.
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“Skinned them in post”. That is cgi.
 
We saw the movie a couple of weeks ago. I enjoyed it, for the most part, though it “got a little Disney” at times. But I did keep having flashbacks to Star Wars… and 633 Squadron…
 
All this talk about pods. This is Maverick we’re talking about here. Most likely he just slide the canopy back and jumped over the side.
 
Velocity173 said:
All this talk about pods. This is Maverick we’re talking about here. Most likely he just slide the canopy back and jumped over the side.
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My favorite bit in the short with James Cordon is when he's briefing him on bailing out of the P-51. "I'm gonna flip upside down and dump you out."
 
DaleB said:
We saw the movie a couple of weeks ago. I enjoyed it, for the most part, though it “got a little Disney” at times. But I did keep having flashbacks to Star Wars… and 633 Squadron…
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Two of my favorites.
 
Jeff Oslick said:
My favorite bit in the short with James Cordon is when he's briefing him on bailing out of the P-51. "I'm gonna flip upside down and dump you out."
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Absolutely hilarious short film.
 
Salty said:
“Skinned them in post”. That is cgi.
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Well, no, actually, it isn't. A real airplane really flew the scene and was really recorded in real flight from the ground and from another real airplane. If you want to call it computer "enhanced" or some such, that's fine. But it isn't computer generated, which is the "G" in "CGI." The distinction is important cinematically, because it means no airplane in the film did things that can't be done in an airplane, and no filming was done by things that can't be done with a camera.
 
I don’t think it means that at all. It still requires cgi to “skin”. And if you are using the computer to “skin” you can use it to create effects that weren’t actually done by the aircraft. I guarantee you that they did not shoot the scenes going down the valley or over the mountain for real. The backgrounds were most certainly cgi, which means the attitudes of the aircraft are not “real”, as you can make it appear it went inverted while it’s still upright, etc, simply by rendering the background as desired.

the background was cgi, and the airplane was “skinned”. But it’s not cgi? Lol. They certainly did good marketing. Exactly what part was real?

There was absolutely cgi in that film. Lots of it. It’s just really good cgi augmented by real physical models. Just as matrix and other films have done.
 
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The takeoff of the Mach 10 plane over the guard shack was real. A recent podcast - The Fighter Pilot Podcast, IIRC - had the Navy coordinator for the movie. He said the guard shack was a lightly-constructed prop. The plane that actually flew the takeoff was an F-18 flown by Blue Angel 5, the lead solo. They used him because he flies the low transition takeoff all the time.

The plane really did go that low, and the wake turb really did raise the roof. And he said Ed Harris really did stand stock-still.
 
They reskinned when they couldn’t get the correct airplane, in all cases the actors were shot in flight, the plane being flown by a navy (or former navy) pilot, not by the actors of course.
In one of the Mission Impossible movies Cruise was hanging from an airplane, the stunt was real, but they erased the safety equipment using computer. Same when Eastwood was hanging from a building in the Line of Fire.
 
I believe the F-14 sequences were CGI....

Ron Wanttaja
 
Salty said:
I guarantee you that they did not shoot the scenes going down the valley or over the mountain for real.
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The snow covered valleys and lake scenes were from the VR-1355 in Wa State up the spine of the Cascades. I flew that route more than 100 times in my career. It was a 200' AGL route then and that's about where they were judging by the trees.
 
“Mover” on YT had a guy on that claimed he did a lot of the CGI / VFX in the movie. Obviously the Dark Star and Tomcat flying scenes weren’t real but he also said a lot of the F-18 scenes were as well. Any of the scenes with more than one F-18 were duplicated by computer. Said the ordnance on the wings was CGI. It’s obvious in that “cobra maneuver” that’s not a real F-18. Of course the Felons were fake as well. Good CGI but fake non the less.

I think it ticked someone off from Paramount because the interview was removed.
 
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